Karpathy builds video recommender from 20 years of Hacker News comments

Karpathy built his own YouTube algo by getting Claude to read 43m Hacker News comments from last 20 years and pull every vid recommendation. There were 6,454 vids and the site (HackerTube) has playlist called The HN Canon” and it says: “If you only watch ten things from this collection, make it these. Each one has been recommended by many different HN commenters over many years, across every kind of thread, not just programming ones. The list opens with short, easy pieces and works up to the longer lectures, closing with the talk HN sends people when life gets hard." *** Link to Canon (about 6 hours total):

Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5: - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session) - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version - HackerTube Longs ✊ A bit more on the process: I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in…